So what happened during my laziness-induced blog-hiatus? Well, first complaint -- Stupid GO Trains dropped our smart-card for the Richmond Hill line. DAMN! They went back to paper-tickets. Well, the paper tickets aren't as boring as I thought. The old machines that "cancels" your paper tickets behave rather like the ones at factories that workers punch-in their time cards with. I feed either end of my ticket into the machine, and it prints the current date-time onto the card.. the term "ticket canceller" the conductors use actually dates back to at least this. A bit of mystery solved!

What's bad about it? Well, according to a friend of mine that's a longer-term GO rider, these machines are old now and they have a hard time working 100%. Yes, that's true, it fails repeately to find a spot to print the date-time on my ticket after some use.. so it was quite frustrating after a while.. especially when yours truly was in a rush, 'frate of missing the train, and our friendly machine says.. nope, your ticket I cannot print on.. DAMN IT...
So, then after my first 10-ride paper ticket ran out, it was the start of July.. so I went to buy a monthly pass instead. So now I can just hop on the train without cancelling nothing.. no worries.. so.. free.. Even better than the metropass on the TTC.